What's up? A lot on this side of the world. Literally. We just finished our first week of service. The main theme from training this week was that our mission here in the Philippines is to participate in projects that promote sustainability and capacity building in the development work. I'm catching on to the language fairly well. It's has its foundation in Spanish. The Filipino people are nice, welcoming and pleasant. They speak English fairly well and are happy when we speak the native language. As for my batch mates. I could do without some of them.
I'm getting used to the time change. They have us in trainings from 8am-5pm every day. Recently they broke us up into our sector groups. There are 23 CYF (children, youth, and family services) volunteers, 33 education (broken into primary-23, secondary-10, and tertiary-3) volunteers and 14 Coastal Resource Management volunteers, which makes 70 of us. Of the CYF volunteers there are four of us who have MSWs; two with BSWs and the rest have some experience working with youth. Our sector manager is a registered social worker and has the responsibility of teaching our technical training and matching us up with our prospective sites.
Our sessions thus far have provided an overview of the sector, the mission and goals, populations we will work with (children in conflict with the law, street children, children with special needs, indigenous people, human trafficking/prostitution, HIV/AIDS) and the type of agency settings that we will be exposed to. We participate in a lot of small group activities and ice breakers. We also watch short videos that the previous batch made for us about their experiences here in the Philippines. I made it clear to Ambet that I want to work with women and children or in child welfare (Department of Social Welfare on Development) type of setting, but I think he has something else in mind. This week we will do field visits to the local government and NGO agencies.
**Now that you have a sense of what's going on logistically, let me tell you about me! ** I lost some weight already; at least that's what the scale says. The Filipino people are really nice to blacks. I had a chance to speak with all of the black girls (6 of us). All but two of them are in the CYF sector. Only really close to one of them. We haven't all been in the same company and I find that weird because it's like we purposely will not be around each other all at the same time so that others will not think that we are excluding ourselves from the rest. I hope that will change in the future. I kind of do my own thing. Groups/clicks have already formed. You have the older group (50 plus- about 15 of them and all of them are white and the oldest person is 76) the young fresh out of college group, 25+ group, and others. You won't find me in the mix too much.
More than likely I will not see a third of these people after this Saturday until we are sworn in as volunteers. While I enjoy talking to some of them, I've really focused more on beginning to form relationships with the people within my sector. We've been to the mall several times over the past two weeks. It's just like the malls in America. No difference there.
I've kind of hit a wall with the food. We have three meals a day in addition to snacks also known as "meryendas" in between meals. Wake up eat rice, lunch, rice, dinner, rice. Meats- chicken, pork, fish. Rarely are there vegetables (which I didn't eat in the states anyway) I drink water or Gatorade. I see now my acid reflux is going to be a problem here. As for fruit, we've had mangoes, pineapples, watermelon, apples, and oranges.
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| This is our family for the next 24 months! |
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| U.S. Peace Corps Philippines July 6th, 2012-September 21st, 2014. |
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